Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life is perhaps the quintessential Christmas classic, notwithstanding its popular religious confusion about human beings becoming angels when they die.

Often remembered as sentimental holiday-themed “Capra-corn” celebrating such platitudes as “Count your blessings” and “Everyone can make a difference,” It’s a Wonderful Life is in fact leavened by darker themes and a more rigorous moral about self-sacrifice.

Like another popular Christmas story, Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, It’s a Wonderful Life is in part about an oppressive relationship between a cruel rich man and a sympathetic, less well-to-do family man that results in supernatural intervention. But where A Christmas Carol was about the redemption of Scrooge, It’s a Wonderful Life is about its Bob Cratchitt, George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart), and his heroic virtue and consistently selfless choices, his dark night of the soul, and his ultimate vindication.

Though George confesses to God, in his darkest hour, that he is “not a praying man,” and though the film doesn’t come very close to the real meaning of Christmas, what George does in its own way reflects the Christmas story: He empties himself out of love, becoming poor for the sake of his people, the citizens of Bedford Falls.

Significantly, the dark alternate reality George experiences in the third act is not the result of something going fundamentally wrong with the world, but is simply the way things would have been had someone not prevented them. (“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”) Rich and satisfying, the film earns its feel-good ending.